


Enough

by gnomesb4trolls



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: The Problem of Susan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 03:20:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13114911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnomesb4trolls/pseuds/gnomesb4trolls
Summary: For everyone who relates to Susan Pevensie, or struggles this time of year. I see you.





	Enough

She still dreams about it, sometimes. 

In the dreams, it’s always the grayest of London days, the kind of day that bleaches everything of color and makes you feel cold right down to your bones. Sometimes she’s on the street outside her flat and sometimes she’s waiting for a train, or lost in a crowd, other people’s arms and backs keeping her from seeing anything. The next part is always the same, though: she looks down and the horn is in her hand. 

In some ways, it’s the thing she misses the most. She carried it with her for so long that it had started to feel like an extension of her body: still, years later, long after that part of her life has started to feel almost like a dream, she’ll reach for it without thinking. There’s always a moment, after her hand meets empty air, when she feels foolish all over again, for not being able to break the habit after all of these years.  
It’s easier, though, to miss the horn than it is to miss her siblings. 

The dreams always end at the moment she puts the horn to her lips. She wakes up with her breath caught in her throat, alone. Lying in her chilly bedroom, watching the gray dawn light creep across the ceiling, she reminds herself that there’s no one to summon, anymore, no Narnia for them to come back from. She can’t say how she knows this, but she feels it, the absence of another world where there used to be one. Or maybe it’s the absence of another self she feels, Queen Susan, that person she grew into in another life. She’s never known how to be two people at once. She’s never known how to walk through a portal and shrug off an identity like a cloak. Maybe her siblings were never good at it, either, but they always seemed better at it than her. 

She still, more nights than not, feels a moment of shock when she looks up and sees the wrong stars. 

***

This is the person she is now: an ordinary girl in an ordinary flat in a gray city. There is nothing hidden under her floorboards or in the back of her closet, no secret identity or messages from another world. 

She doesn’t have a single thing from Narnia, nothing that she can hold in her hand to remind herself that it was all real. She could have slipped something into her pocket on that last trip: an acorn or a shoelace or a handful of sand. A part of her hadn’t really believed that it was over, not until she was back in England with empty hands, no evidence but her memories. Her mind doesn’t hold things as tightly as she would like, but her body knows: when she wakes up in the middle of the night and expects a different ceiling, when she steps outside and the air feels wrong on her skin. When her head feels too light, because she spent years getting used to the weight of a crown.

It wasn’t ever the crown that had mattered to her: it was the feeling that she mattered, that people trusted her, that trust was something she was capable of earning. 

***  
She’s walking home through the winter twilight, remembering another winter, the first one in Cair Paravel after the war. As the days shortened Edmund seemed to shrink, his skin translucent, his eyes hollow. They were all feeling the weight of it, this anniversary, the presence of what they hadn’t yet rebuilt. She couldn’t always fall asleep. Walking the corridors alone, stepping from one pool of moonlight to another, she felt better, if only because she was moving. 

“I didn’t know you were up.” Edmund was sitting on the wide stone ledge of one of the diamond-paned windows, one knee drawn up to his chest.   
Susan hesitated. “Yes.”   
He kept looking out of the window. The moon had set and it was too dark to see the ocean, but they could hear the waves rolling to shore. She sat down at the other end of the ledge, careful. He shifted towards her, just enough so that she knew she was welcome.   
She wanted to ask if he was all right, but even that felt like it would be an intrusion.  
“Do you ever feel like it’s never going to be enough?”   
“What?”   
Half of his face was in shadow; he turned his head, just enough that she could make out one eye and one cheekbone. He shrugged. “Everything. Sometimes it feels like there’s a gap I’m trying to fill, a broken place, and there’s just not enough of me.”   
“I think we all feel that way.”   
“Even Peter?”  
She smiled in the dark, even though he probably couldn’t see it. “Even Peter.”   
After a little silence, she leaned forward and put her hand on his knee. He’d shot up in this last year, all gangly limbs. “You’re enough.”   
Susan still couldn’t read his expression, but she felt something change. “So are you.” 

She takes a deep breath, here on her dreary London street, not far from home. Edmund had been there the last time she had seen them, but he hadn’t said anything, not the whole time Peter and Lucy were arguing, just come with us, please, I promise you’ll remember. She’d wanted to say, I want to but I can’t bear it, I can’t try to be Queen Susan again and fail. She’d wanted to say, I kissed a girl and I felt like I was giving up my kingdom, but I didn’t care. She’d been tired, though, and it had hurt too much to see them trying to call back the person they wanted her to be, as if the right combination of words could roll the clock back. So she’d let them think that she didn’t believe, that she didn’t remember, because it was easier, because she thought that it might even be better for everyone. 

The whole time, Edmund hadn’t spoken a word. She’d been afraid to look at him, because of the three of them he was the most likely to see what she was trying to do. At the end, as they’d all filed out, he’d caught her eye for a second, and she’d felt a desperate hope that maybe he understood. 

***

Her flat is full of shadows. She switches on a lamp, the yellow light making a bright circle on the floor. She shrugs out of her coat and lays it down on the back of a chair. 

Her rugs are shabby but some of the furniture isn’t bad: she’s kept a few odds and ends from her parents’ house, just to have something familiar. She hasn’t kept much. It was easier, not to keep much. There’s a drawer in her bedside table with a few of her siblings’ things: Lucy’s favorite stuffed rabbit, kept long past childhood; a set of Peter’s cuff links; a notebook of Edmund’s, which she’s never let herself open.   
In her tiny kitchen, she puts the kettle on and sets out a cup and saucer for herself. It’s freezing but she loves this place more than she cares to admit, this shabby little home that she’s made for herself. 

It isn’t much, but it’s hers, and she is filling the space as best she can.


End file.
